Wolf and the Start of a New Journy
by The Will of Holo
Summary: Holo's new life takes form.
1. Chapter 1

1

Holo's hand rested on her navel, a barely visible bulge just beginning to form below her stomach. The cart continued to rattle along, both its occupants lost in thought of their lives to come. Deep inside Holo, a third party dreamed of things unknown to both Lawrence and Holo. Three lives. There had not been three lives in this cart since Cole had left them the previous October.

"Tis strange." Remarked Holo. "I've had this life a full five hundred years. I've seen mountains too high for the clouds to surmount, crossed rivers fathoms deep, and fought wild beasts that would make the bravest man quiver in his boots- but no event that transpired before I met you ever caused me any fear."

"You must be getting soft." Lawrence replied. "I have heard that women bearing children tend to lose sight of the people they were before." He knew he was in dangerous water, but he pushed on, ignoring the irritated swishing of Holo's tail beneath the blanket they shared. "It must be my influence that makes you soft."

"It would be wouldn't it?" She shot back. "After all, she is your child, isn't she? I should assume that being part human she would be weak as an infant, only regaining the majesty of the Nobel wolves when she matures in to a strong young women!" Holo delivered this verbal parry with arms extended, as if mocking the whole conversation.

Lawrence smiled and looked to her stomach. "You said 'She', how do you know it will be a 'she'?"

Holo grinned pleased that he had asked. "Because even at such a young age, she must be wise beyond her years the likes of others in her state, so I know she would never be foolish enough to choose the feeble male gender."

"Ho Ho, so you think my gender is feeble, do you?" Inquired Lawrence, barley concealing a grin.

"Not entirely, I suppose, you do have your uses… But they must escape me at the moment, for I cannot find them."

"They must be limited to alcohol and sweet apples, mustn't they then?"

"Oh, mentioning apples, you are mean indeed. Speaking of apples, you will buy me some in town, wont you?"

Lawrence pulled her to his side, and she leaned into him, breathing in the scent of his jacket. It was her scent now too, and it would be the scent of their child's when it was born. It was a soft smell, earthy and whole, mixed with the smoke from their nightly fires, and the smell of their passion. It was a good smell, and it made her feel warm and safe against the cold that intruded through her robe, and their blanket.

"Have I ever refused apples to you?" He consoled her, smiling. "But back to what you said before, you said you were only ever afraid with me, didn't you?"

"I did." Holo said, her voice muffled by his coat. "And I am. You were the only person who ever made me feel afraid. It was always worse in my head. I couldn't stand the thought of being alone after we met. I would torture myself over it, never wanting to make you leave me, and always thinking of one more reason to delay our journey to Yoitsu."

"Well…" Lawrence began to console her, then realized that she did not need it.

….

The sun had fallen, taking its warmth and light with it, Leaving both those jobs to the fire Lawrence had conjured. The pair sat against the cart, their backs to its cold planks, their hands held out to receive as much of the fires heat as they could.

"I was thinking.." Began Holo, choosing her words carfully. "That when the baby comes, we shouldn't do it by ourselves, should we?"

"I suppose not, but it would create significant problems if we intend to keep you a secret from the church, no normal midwife would do, and we obviously couldn't seek refuge at the church, it would be asking for trouble." He pondered the question. It was too true. He himself knew nothing of child birth, having been present only at his own, and he grinned when thinking of the usefulness that that would be.

"I was thinking that the only good option would be to go back to Kumer, and find that Diana Women." Holo looked positively livid at the idea of asking another incarnation for help. "But I can't see another way to get around it and do it safely."

"I never thought the wise wolf would go to anyone for help, let alone another woman." Lawrence jested.

"You know full well that I only do this for the child." It clearly hurt her to have to ask for help from someone whom she had been at odds with. She clenched her fists in front of the fire and lightly punched the dirt on which they sat. "If there was anyone else… any other way… oh that wrenched bird I can already see the look on her face when we show up and she sees me… like this."

"Do you regret it?" Lawrence asked, already knowing the answer.

"Of course not, but I've never been a mother before, and it scares me. Whenever something has happened to us, I've been able to figure something out." Her eyes began to water and she leaned over, putting her head in his lap. "But this is all new to me, and I can't think through it. It's not something that can be thought through I suppose."

Lawrence shared her fears for the health of the child, and his own of his own ability to be a capable parent. He stroked her hair and wrapped the blanket more tightly around them. "This is normal, I'm sure all parents face this at one point or another, fear about whether or not they are up to it."

Holo looked none too reassured. "We are not like normal parents, though, are we?"

He smiled and lay down next to her, resting his heat atop hers, facing the dyeing remains of the fire. "No, I suppose were not." They sat in silence for some minutes. Watching the fire die, and soon the light of the stars and moon were the only thing that brought light to the world. "Listen, it's only a few hours out of our way to get to Kumer, we could go there tomorrow and _I'll_ ask Diana for her assistance.

"I'd like that." Holo replied a small tired voice from under his head. "This is rather exciting though, isn't it?" She rested her hand on her belly and held Lawrence's with the other. "Humans have children by the time they are twenty, but I, several times over their elders am at a loss for what to do. It is most frustrating, to think that a mere human could have capable knowledge that I know nothing of."

"We'll go to Kumer tomorrow, and that's as far as you'll have to worry." Lawrence hopped to God that what he said was true.

Holo sighed deeply, her hand rising and falling on her stomach, in time with her breathing. Lawrence put his hand on top of hers and felt her rhythmic, powerful heart beat. They drifted off to sleep this way, each consoled by the other till the next morning.

….

The following day however, they were unable to set out for Kumer. When Lawrence woke, the ground beside him cold. He lifted his head to look for Holo, and saw her some distance away from the road. He shrugged of the blanket and the sleep that clung to him and walked over to her cautiously. Only when he was beyond the remains of the fire, did he see what she was doing. She was bent over the stream beside the road, wrenching, tears of discomfort streaming down her face. Lawrence ran the few remaining steps to her and kneeled down next to her.

"Why didn't you wake me!?" Lawrence exclaimed, his fear fueling anger.

"Wouldn't… have… made it to-" She pulled forward and vomited violently into the frigid water. She leaned back and gagged again, dry wrenching repeatedly over the stream. "I'm sorry, its not the food you cooked, it was something else, I don't know what I ate, but it wasn't any fault of yours."

"It's not anything you ate." Lawrence said, his had resting on the small of her hunched back. "Its morning sickness, from the baby. Mark's wife had it too, remember when we visited the, and the entire time we were there she was too sick to even get out of bed."

"I remember. But only because I thought it odd that Mark was doing the cooking." Her voice was week, pained and feeble. Lawrence had never seen her in such a state, and her lack or embarrassment about her current situation proved how bad she felt. "Please," She said meekly. "Sit with me until… until its over."

"Of course." Lawrence smiled ruefully "You didn't actually think I would leave, even if you hadn't asked?"

"No, no, I suppose not, but still I-" Suddenly she gagged, leaned over the stream again, and sent a pitiful stream of bile into the water. "Oh, please make it stop. Just make it stop." Holo rocked back on her hands and knees, her eyes closed tears trickling out from under each lid.

Lawrence stood, and after assuring Holo he would return immediately, returned to the cart and, after a moment of searching through their things returned to the river bank where Holo sat. He squatted next to her and removed several items from his pockets. "Here, drink this, it will help with the nausea." He gave her a small glass vile that he had gotten from Mark's wife. "Anna gave it to me when I told her you were expecting. She said it would help with the vomiting."

"Thank you." She said hoarsely.

Lawrence wiped the side of her mouth, liberating a strand of saliva. "Let's get you back to bed, God knows you need it."

"He must know many things." She told him weekly, as he carried her to the cart. "But even he can't know what this must be like."

"No." Lawrence said. "I suppose he can't, can he."


	2. Wolf and a New Journy: Chapter 2

2

Holo was sick all of that day and most of the next, but on the third day she felt well enough to brave the cart and the bumpy road to Kumer. The weather was still bitingly cold, and Holo spent most of the journey covered in blankets beneath the cover of the wagon. As they traveled south, the weather improved, as if to mimic Holo's recovery. They reached Kumer sometime that evening, and retreated behind its walls in time to avoid traveling in the harsh winter winds.

Once inside the walls, Holo began inquiring to Lawrence about the prospect of food, and upon deliberation, they decided to drop their supplies at the inn before going to a local tavern for diner. "It can wait 'till tomorrow, cant it?" Holo asked, looking guiltily at her plate once she had finished "You mean going to see Diana?" Lawrence replied, pulling bits of fish from his teeth.

"Of course it can, unless you plan on giving birth today. Tomorrow I'll go and see her- You don't have to come if you don't want to." She grinned.

"Was my displeasure at seeing her in this condition so obvious my face betrayed my emotions?" She asked, a sly smile playing across her face.

"Oh ha ha. I see what you're doing by the way and I'm not falling for it you may not want to go with me to tell her the details, but in the end she's going to get her hands on you regardless of what you want. And I do mean before the fact, you're probably going to be seeing her a lot if we go through with this, so you better get to liking her." He still found her anonymity towards Diana puzzling, after all, she was the only other incarnation they had met, and it baffled Lawrence that Holo would not want Diana to see her while she was pregnant.

"Its not that I dislike her, but she and are all too similar. It's hard to explain, but I feel as if the father apart we are, the safer we each are, if that makes sense."

"I suppose it's not hard to understand, after all, when you get more and more similar people together it's easier to notice them." Lawrence said s he thought about what would happen if anyone were to discover Diana and Holo in the same place. "That reminds me, will it be able to change forms- the baby I mean."

"I don't know," Said Holo. She gathered her clothes about her in preparation to face the biting winds outside the tavern. "As far as I know this is uncharted territory. None of my kin ever mated with humans, and although I did hear of it before, Diana told me during my pyrite binge." She looked a little apprehensive at the unknown entity that would be their child.

"Don't worry about it." Lawrence advised. "No matter what the world presents us, we'll get through it fine." He leaned over and grabbed her shoulder, turning her towards him, "No matter what we have to contend with, the _three _of us will get through it."

Without warning she grabbed the collar of his coat and pulled him down to her and kissed him hard on the mouth. The crowd in the tavern who had been watching the beautiful young women and her, they hoped beyond hope, friend gave out a collective sigh of disappointment as they realized that the chances they had with the auburn haired, red eyed beauty were even worse than they had initially thought. The tavern's bar maid let out a similar sound of disapproval, she was not a foolish girl and she knew that there was something very unusual about the couple. Leaving the kegs and flagons of beer and mead in the hands of a bus boy, she hurried after the couple into the night, only catching them as they rounded a corner.

"PARDON ME SIR!" she cried after their receding backs, "EXCUSE ME SIR!" They stopped and she caught up to them, a little out of breath, her chest burning from the cold air. "Pardon my intrusion sir, I'm the patron from the bar, and I saw you and your wife, and, I'm really sorry for the intrusion, but I couldn't help but notice that your wife is pregnant, and I was just hoping, well, I mean-" She stopped abruptly and looked at her feet. "Let me start over. My name is Aalima, and my uncle is the pastor of the church here in Kumer, and I was hoping that when you get your child baptized, that maybe you could have it done in Kumer." She said this all very fast as if afraid if she stopped to breath they would walk away from her.

Holo placed a hand upon her hand mouth, suppressing laughter at the notion that Lawrence was her husband and that she would ever have her child baptized. "I'm sorry Miss Aalima," Lawrence told her politely. "My companion here is not my wife, but if we decide to have our child baptized here in Kumer, I will be sure that your uncle is the man we go to. I assume he is the only pastor here at the moment?"

Aalima looked shocked "I… Well, Oh! Yes. He is the only holy man in Kumer right now." Truthfully Aalima was stunned and appalled, to have a child out of wedlock without the consent of the Lord was a sin that could have a woman sentenced to death by fire, not a fate at all desirable. Aalima make an excuse about leaving the bar unattended and hurried of the tavern, leaving Lawrence and Holo standing in the street, the wind catching at the hems of their robes.

Holo began to laugh, a deep, hearty laugh that involved a fair bit of snorting. Lawrence looked at her bemused. "I really don't see how this is so funny," he asked her beginning to chuckle himself. "She wants… us- ha hah – to have our child- oha ha ha- baptized in the name of –Ha ha heh- God, and she doesn't realize –ah ah ha – that I was once worshiped as a god!" She broke down completely, bent double wit h violent outbursts of laughter. Her amusement was infections, and before long, they were both leaning against each other, overtaken by gales of laughter that were carried away on the winds, lost to the empty market stalls and the dark alchemists quarter.

Alone deep inside the city, a woman sat awake, her thoughts accompanied by a lone candle to light her work. She brushed a feather of pure white off of the book she had open on her lap and smiled. The wolf was back.


	3. Chapter 3

3

The morning following their encounter with Aalima, Lawrence woke for the third time in as many days to the sound of Holo's stomach rejecting the contents of the previous night's dinner. Her morning sickness had been getting progressively worse since the previous week, her morning wrenching replacing the violent hangovers she had experienced before the pregnancy. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire." Remarked to himself before quickly getting out of bed and walking over to her.

"Not feeling so vital today, are we?" He inquired, giving her a skin filled with water to rinse the bile out of her mouth with, and emptying the bucket she had been vomiting into down the refuse shoot.

"I never imagined that abstaining from alcohol would make my mornings worse than they were before." She said from behind her hand. "Give me back the bucket, its starting again."

He set the bucket down in front of her and knelt on the floor next to her. "Don't worry about a thing, just focus on getting better." He rubbed her back with his palm and held her hair out of her face while she wretched. After several minutes after which nothing came up, Holo rinsed her mouth out, and, supported by Lawrence, walked over to the bed were she collapsed face down upon it.

"Go get the bird." She commanded, her voice muffled by the mattress. "I refuse to spend another morning in the throes of this curse." She shifted to the fetal position and pulled the blankets up over her head, leaving only the tip of her tail visible.

Lawrence felt sorry for her. He had done everything he could, but no poultice he gave her, no change of diet he could think of had alleviated the misery of Holo's mornings. He put on the rest of his cloths and prepared to venture out into the morning chill.

"Before you leave," she called to him as he opened the door. "When you return, please, if you can, bring me some pickled onions. I smelled some in the tavern yesterday and was quite overcome with their odor." She peeked over the covers, her face still pale. "Will you find some for me?"

"I'll look in the market." Lawrence assured her. "But I'm sure they'll be quite easy to find. pickled food is all too common during the winter."

Holo made no noise, but a feeble wave of her tail told him she had heard him.

"Stay well." He said over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him.

….

The fog seemed to have devoured the world. It had descended in the early hours of the morning and gotten itself into everything. It had turned the entire world grey, punctuated only by the infrequent oil lights that lit the street during the darkest hours of the night. As Lawrence walked through the streets to the entrance of the alchemist's quarter, he looked at the town around him. It was eerie this early in the morning. The streets were all but deserted, and the only person he passed during this time was a sleeping drunk who had apparently not made it home after the pervious night's revelry.

Finding the alchemists quarter turned out to be harder than he remembered. The entire area was surrounded by a stone wall to keep the fumes from the alchemists experiment out of the rest of the city. Lawrence followed the wall until a gate loomed out of the fog in front of him. After persuading the lone guard to let him through, he wandered the inner city of tall leaning buildings and narrow streets until he found a place he remembered. He consulted his memory and followed his instincts till he found Diana's door, a thick wooden thing, reinforced with iron pegs and set into the very stone of the wall around it.

Lawrence held his breath and knocked twice.


	4. Chapter 4

4

Holo lay on her side, taking as much weight of her stomach as possible. The swelling of her belly made stating in one position for long durations uncomfortable. She looked at the bed's head board, waiting for Lawrence to return, or for sleep to come to her. Neither would happen presently. She groaned, and swung her legs out of bed, hesitating only a moment before putting the soles of her bare feet onto the cold wood slats that made up the floor of the second story, and the roof the floor below. The room they were staying in was simple, but provided the necessary comforts that they required. A fireplace that had a ventilated shaft that remove smoke, a table, currently laden with their traveling supplies, and a small locked chest at the end of the bed. One bed. Holo smiled when she remembered the days when she and Lawrence had required serpent sleeping arrangements. It was no longer an issue that they needed deliberate about. Since almost five months previously, they had been sharing the same bed, taking comfort in the others warmth in the increasingly cold nights.

Holo sat down at the table, pulling the bag they carried their food in towards her. She looked into it without enthusiasm, trying to find interest in the rye bread and strong cheese they had been living off of for the duration of their travels. "Really," She muttered under her breath. "I do hate our options when it comes to nonperishable food." She pushed the bag back onto the table, and flopped onto the bed, bored beyond expression. She rolled onto her side, pulled her tail up between her legs, and began to groom it, even though it was already clean. She wondered if she ought to have gone with Lawrence, even if it meant seeing the bird again. She wished something interesting would happen soon.

….

Lawrence stood on Diana's stoop, willing her to open the door. He knew that he could come at a latter date with no risk to Holo's health, but he wanted to minimize his visits to the alchemist's quarter. If he were wholly honest, the place scared him a little. He knew that most alchemists only practiced the manipula voice said from behind him.

of metals, but Bazo had told him on his previous visit here that there were people in this area who practiced darker things. No wishing to prolong his stay if Diana was not home, he turned to leave, stepping off the stone doorframe into the muddy street. "Not very patient, are you?" A voice said from behind him.

Lawrence turned around and looked into the darkness the open door had reveled. Diana stood in the doorway, framed by darkness. A single feather drifted down from behind her and came to rest on the floor. "You have quite a bit of explaining to do Kraft." Diana said to him in her mystical voice, as she stepped aside to let him come in.


End file.
